“I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

“Not yet. What can I help you with?”

“I was wondering if you’d like to meet me somewhere for a drink.”

She sighed deeply and with what sounded like genuine dismay. “I doubt it’s as simple as all that. What’s your ulterior motive?”

“I’m not sure I’d call it an ulterior motive. I wanted to talk to you about Dead Husband.”

“Oh, Christ. I was hoping for something a little more challenging. I’ll tell you what: if you bring a bottle of inexpensive red wine, I’ll let you in. That way we get to have our drinks and I don’t have to change out of my jammies.”

As he was creeping down the staircase, Loretta called, “Where you headed, Mr. Sullivan?”

“Out,” he said. He was officially done with filling in Loretta and Henry on every detail of his life. The final straw had come when they’d grilled him about Brian Cody, about his dark good looks, his exceptionally fashionable wardrobe, all in a way that Desmond found insulting, as if they were amazed that someone who looked like Brian would be visiting someone who looked like him.

It was a mild night, remarkable (or frightening, he wasn’t sure which) for early November in Boston, and as he walked along Marlborough Street, he could hear the music and laughter of dinner parties spilling from open windows. Someone in a house somewhere behind him was playing Chopin on a piano, not well, but with halting tenderness. It was an etude, one of those melancholy Chopin etudes full of rivers and flickering light and longing. Boris had studied this piece last year, and Desmond and Russell had lain in bed together listening to him struggle through it night after night for more than a month until finally he could play it from beginning to end without stopping, gliding over his own mistakes as deftly as a skier absorbing bumps on an uneven slope. Desmond hadn’t been able to figure out why he had found Boris’s gawky performance so touching, but now, listening to this other, slightly more accomplished pianist, he heard the elusive ghost of the piece as it was intended to be played and heard the performer reaching for it, fingers outstretched, inching close but not quite taking hold. You could hear the longing in the performer as clearly as you could hear it in the music itself. He and Russell had been reaching toward something, too, but it seemed as if they’d missed it and he had no idea how to get back on track. Perhaps Rosemary, unlikely expert that she appeared to be, could tell him how to do it.

2.